


Collateral

by InsaneTrollLogic



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Gen, No avengers only fallout, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), The Blip, realistic consequences, the snappening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-02 18:36:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20817317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsaneTrollLogic/pseuds/InsaneTrollLogic
Summary: After the snap, it rains people.





	Collateral

**Author's Note:**

> FIRST MCU FIC. It contains 0 MCU characters. (whoops)  
I literally can't stop thinking about how much I HATE the snap.

After the snap, it rains people. Not for long, of course, it only takes a few minutes to go from an airplane’s cruising altitude to ground level. In the United States, there were approximately 5000 airplanes the sky at the time of the snap, each flight averaging between one and two hundred people. When the snap was undone, well, they reentered the world at the same place the left it: cruising altitude.

It’s not a bad way to go. The shock of the pressure differences at altitude mean a lot of the people lose consciousness before they even start falling. The rest of them hit free fall within a few seconds and don’t feel a thing on impact.

* * *

Hundreds of thousands reappear on highways. Some of them get lucky, appearing during a lull in traffic that gives them just enough time to bolt to the shoulder before the cars catch up and hurtle past them.

Most of them aren’t so fortunate. They appear in the middle of the road, during rush hour and are smeared across a windshield seconds later. I-95 closes for a full two days after the incident as people try to make sense of all the fatalities.

It’s almost as bad on public transportation, as groups of people appear in packs in otherwise empty subway tunnels. They spend a few minutes panicked and screaming at each other in the dark before the next train cuts straight through the crowd.

* * *

“Who the fuck are you?!” a man screams at the intruder. He brandishes a gun in front of him.

“Who am I?” the intruder answers. “I live here! Who the fuck are you?”

The gun shakes in the man’s hands. He can hear a growing chorus of sirens outside his window. “You need to get out of my apartment! Right now.”

“This is my fucking apartment!” The intruder shouts. “Put down the fucking gun!”

The intruder takes a step forward.

The gun cracks.

* * *

This is a nightmare.

Ella’s clothes billow out in the water. Her hat fell off in the first twenty minutes. She can see it drifting in the distance. Her arms ache at the effort of treading water.

When she first hit the ocean there were easily two hundred others around her. They’d all been as baffled as she was. It seemed like the cruise ship simply vanished beneath them. Four hours later, the panic has faded into exhaustion and all the slightly manic jokes about the Bermuda Triangle have been swallowed by the sea.

There are fewer than sixty heads now.

A wave crashes over Ella and she swallows a mouthful of salty water before fighting her way back to the surface.

The sun twinkles as it starts dipping below the horizon. A shiver rushes through her.

She keeps treading.

* * *

_new phone, u blip? _tweets twitter user tredioXXz and the #blip starts trending almost instantly. It’s a way to normalize the sudden split in culture, a way to laugh off five years of trauma on both sides.

Trey Riojo gets a spin through the talk show circuit when he verifies his account. The media is eager to talk to the man who coined the term blip and Trey’s good interview; charming, quirky, and utterly at ease with questions about his own missing five years.

“Dude, I get to take a legitimate redo on a semester I was about to fail. I didn’t even have to break up with my boyfriend. Five years is better than ghosting hands down.”

A woman unloads three shots into his torso as he walks out of the Late Show. She’s screaming, “A fucking_ blip?_ That was my life!”

Someone catches the whole thing on video and uploads to YouTube with the titled _blipicide._

That name catches on, too.

No one steps forward to claim they coined it.

* * *

“Madam President?”

The secretary of agriculture stands at the door to the Oval Office. He hesitates for a second even after he’s given permission to enter.

“Leo!” the president greets. “How are the kids?”

His kids are fine. Both of them. The entire situation is surreal, his twins now separated by five years. He couldn’t be happier and he wants desperately to be back at home, between the two of them as they watch Saturday morning cartoons.

“My kids are perfect. It’s like a dream.” Only his job isn’t dreams. “But I think we need to talk food supply. Production has halved over the past few years.”

The president’s eyes widen. She’s always been a relentless pragmatist, even when faced with a miracle and she understands the scope of the problem almost instantly. “Shit, Leo.”

Food insecurity was an issue even before the snap. “I think we need to talk rationing.”

“Distribution, too,” the president says. “Call in everyone you think we might need. We need to get ahead of this.”

* * *

Kayla Makenzie’s phone has been ringing non-stop for the past three hours. They don’t still have the records of all of the people who _used to _have their kids in this daycare and she’s not allowed to release a child to anyone but their approved guardian.

She doesn’t know half of these children, much less their parents.

The phone rings. She answers, “Sunshine Childcare, how can I help you?”

She pauses at the description, cups a hand over the receiver and shouts, “Lexa Wicker?”

It’s not a name she recognizes, but a tiny red-haired girl jerks her head up. She turns back to the phone. “I think so. You’d have to come by to make sure. I understand it’s not really feasible to drive right now…”

It’s easily the most emotional day of her entire career. No one had really escaped the snap without loss and she gets to watch miracle after miracle as parents reunite with their children.

She wants to go home to her own miracles, but she can’t leave the kids.

Despite the mess of traffic and public transportation, most parents manage to make it to the day care as soon as they realize what’s happened (all of them, was it really_ all of them?_). But at seven, she’s still got four children in her care.

She puts them down for the night at eight and starts answering her own barrage of texts. Another few hours pass before she looks at the sleeping toddlers still in her care. Two, she’s never met before today, but the other two have at least one parent who survived the snap. Gretta’s Dad in particular made sure he was never late to pick up his daughter.

She looks to the clock.

It’s almost one in the morning.

She’s starting to think no one else is coming.

* * *

There is a snap and half the world fades to dust.

There is a snap and half the world comes back.

Everyone agrees it was worth it, but when the dust settles, it’s not a fairy tale.

The term blip flits in and out of the public consciousness.

History books call it the Decimation.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Decimation: Reduction by one tenth.  
2\. Do you know how hard it is to write Subway instead of Metro? Because the struggle is real.  
3\. Look I get that FFH treats the snap largely as a funny plot device, but if you think about it 10 seconds YOU REALIZE IT'S A HORROR SHOW.


End file.
